"A woman whose 14-year-old son killed himself is calling for parents to be given the legal right to access their child's social media accounts to help understand why they died.
Ellen Roome has gathered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for social media companies to be required to hand over data to parents after a child has died.
Under the current law, parents have no legal right to see whether their child was being bullied or threatened, was looking at self-harm images or other harmful content, or had expressed suicidal feelings online or searched for help with mental health problems."
"This is a broader pattern we're seeing across other fields where LLMs are being deployed. Whether it's coding, writing, design, law, or medicine, the most effective AI users are people who already have deep domain expertise. Expertise isn't obsolete; it's more important than ever-because the value isn't just in producing outputs quickly. It's in being able to vet, steer, and improve those outputs.
The future of computer science education isn't about teaching less. It's about teaching differently. We still need students who can understand how software works at a fundamental level. But we also need to train them to collaborate with AI-to become fluent in prompting, reviewing, debugging, and refining AI-generated outputs. Mastering this hybrid skillset will be critical not just for engineers, but for anyone hoping to thrive in a world where knowledge work is increasingly AI-augmented.
Practically speaking, AI could dramatically lower the barrier to entry for students. When I was in high school, it would take months (if not years) of training in CS before you could create a game or app that was genuinely cool to people that aren't inherently curious and nerdy."
"What if we could forecast how armed factions-and the communities around them-might respond to a draft peace deal before it's signed? What if we could test, virtually, whether a public apology would calm tensions… or make things worse?
That's the provocative promise behind the growing use of digital twins in peacemaking: AI-powered simulations of complex social systems, designed to help us understand conflict-and imagine pathways out of it."
"in the post-Snowden era, we can no longer address the "digital divide" just by providing access -- we also have to teach people how their online usage is spied on, how that will harm them, and what to do about it. "
"Search for Common Ground designed BridgeBot together with TangibleAI after our research revealed that most people shy away - or turn away - from discussions online once they heat up. We learned that few people felt comfortable responding, and even fewer felt that they could be constructive.
BridgeBot acts like a companion to help social media users think differently about how to deal with differences, by equipping them with skills and perspectives on empathy, identity, perception and non-violent communication."
"How is a 14-year-old supposed to understand that such chatbots work a lot like an echo - that the more he spoke and the greater his longings, the deeper the longings of his "girlfriend" became too, and no matter what he said, the more she encouraged him. The more he thought about death, the more often she asked about it. She was, after all, merely the reflection of his own voice, albeit one trained by a vast amount of data. At some point, Sewell must have stopped believing that the real world was outside of this labyrinth."